Author Topic: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial  (Read 4151 times)

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Offline Filemon

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Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« on: May 25, 2011, 08:25:32 AM »
Hello everyone,

Recently I have installed my first weather station, which is now fully operational.

Like most of us, I intend to build a dynamic weather website.
The last couple of weeks I have familiarized myself with the basics of building a dynamic website using Dreamweaver, PHP, and MySQL (the lynda.com course).

Now, I wonder; Is there a complete course or walkthrough specifically for building a weather website using these software packages?
I am looking to cover specific 'gaps' in my current knowledge concerning this subject;

1. transfering (live) data from Labview (national instruments) to a MySQL database.

2. reading out the data (say every minute) from the MySQL database using Dreamweaver (probably including a PHP-script to do the job).

3a. graphing the data acquired this way
3b. being able to actively work with the data such as averaging, switching between daily values, and current values etc.


Many thanks in advance!

Filemon

Offline Budgie

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #1 on: May 25, 2011, 09:44:45 AM »
You could save a lot of time and use software like Weather Display or Cumulus to record the data on your PC and upload small text files with the weather data in them (these can be uploaded once every few seconds) and then use the website templates from Saratoga Weather for your website.

This is much easier than using MySQL but you can still alter and add to the PHP files to customise your site to what you want.
Click on the banner below to see what I've done with it.  ;)

Edit: I forgot to ask what weather station you have?
« Last Edit: May 25, 2011, 09:48:32 AM by Budgie »

Offline SLOweather

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #2 on: May 25, 2011, 11:29:25 AM »
If you do not already have PHP/MySQL experience, you have a considerable learning curve ahead of you.

Based on your mention of Labview, it seems that you may have rolled your own weather station in some fashion. As Budgie mentioned, please give us more detail on your weather station hardware and software, so we may better assist and advise you.

Offline LTCSZ

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #3 on: May 27, 2011, 08:34:23 PM »
Budgie: How did you make that cool image in your signature? Thanks...

Steve
Steve
Retired Lieutenant Colonel, USA
Garden City, KS, USA

Offline Budgie

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #4 on: May 28, 2011, 07:00:38 AM »
It's made using PhotoShop, I found a tutorial and adapted it.
I use the image as a background for a Weather Display "Custom Screen" and get WD to put the weather data onto the image.  ;)

Offline Filemon

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2011, 09:59:40 AM »
Hello again,

Thanks for the replies.

I realize that doing my own PHP and MySQL is quite some work. However, I have already managed to get most of the data aquisition and graphing to work on my website.
So I'll just go on and keep you all informed about the process.

Thanks again!


Filemon

Offline Filemon

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #6 on: June 11, 2011, 06:12:28 AM »
Hello everyone,

Well, the first version of the website is online. :-P
(see; weather.nat.vu.nl)

Obviously, I already discovered many flaws that need to be fixed.
Also, I am still not very fund of the lay-out, but I will fix that the coming week.

I must say that the PHP-scripting and learning curve to understand MySQL was tough, but doable in a reasonable amount of time.

Ok then.
Again, many thanks!

Filemon

Filemon

Offline moto51

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Re: Building a dynamic weather website "walkthrough"/tutorial
« Reply #7 on: August 07, 2011, 12:36:45 AM »
With no PHP or MySQL experience, I managed to get the raw data from WeatherLink to be inserted into a database every 5 minutes and then have recently created a php file which runs numerous SQL Queries to retrieve things such as monthly highs and lows, etc. You can check out some of my handiwork (which I haven't moved to the homepage yet) at http://update.jubileeweather.com I am currently running the whole page off the database just because I can but I think I'm going to have the page run off a .txt file and then just the highs, etc grabbed from the database to save running ~10 queries every time the page loads.